July 2003 Top Story Archives

»»Ed Lu Turns 40 Aboard the International Space Station

[Tuesday, July 01, 2003] NASA Astronaut Ed Lu will celebrate his 40th birthday on July 1 while orbiting 240 miles above the Earth in the International Space Station. In honor of his birthday, Hawaii's governor, Linda Lingle, proclaimed July 1 'Edward Tsang Lu Day' in Hawaii.

[Tuesday, July 01, 2003] This Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera image shows a series of depressions made on a dust-mantled slope as a boulder rolled down it, sometime in the recent past. The full image picture covers an area only 810 meters (about 886 yards) across

[Tuesday, July 01, 2003] The Columbia Accident Investigation Board today issued its fourth preliminary finding and recommendation to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in advance of its appearance in the final report.

[Wednesday, July 02, 2003] ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft is progressing further every day on its journey to the Red Planet. In the weeks since its launch, engineers have started to thoroughly test the spacecraft and its equipment.

[Wednesday, July 02, 2003] The Phase II High Speed Flight Demonstration (HSFD) test flight of Japan's prototype space shuttle ended with the craft damaged after the recovery system did not work properly.

[Sunday, July 06, 2003] The launch of the MER-B Mars Exploration Rover "Opportunity" has been postponed an additional 24 hours. The delay is due to the failure of a battery cell associated with a component of the launch
vehicle's flight termination system.

»»Keith Cowing's Devon Island Journal: 3-5 July 2003: Arrival and Getting to Work

[Monday, July 07, 2003] We awoke this morning to some good news: weather conditions here and at Devon Island, plus the condition of our landing strip on Devon Island, were all within acceptable limits. As such we were going to get at least three flights in today.

[Monday, July 07, 2003] This is the dusty time of year for Mars. The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team has been anticipating for months that late June through July 2003 will be a time of large dust storms and considerable haze.

[Monday, July 07, 2003] After several delays the last couple of weeks due to problems with the Boeing Delta II the Mars Exploration Rover (MER-B) Opportunity successfully lifted off for Mars today at 11:18:15 p.m. EDT (0318:15 GMT).

[Wednesday, July 09, 2003] Pluto's atmosphere is expanding even as it continues on its long orbit away from the sun, say astronomers. In fact, the temperature of Pluto's mostly nitrogen atmosphere has increased around 1 degree Celsius since it was closest to the sun in 1989.

[Wednesday, July 09, 2003] Science fiction writers and movie-makers have imagined a world completely covered by an ocean, but what if one really existed? Would such a world support life, and what would this life be like?

»»Raptor Evolution on a Cosmic Scale: Why the Owl Nebula Looks Like an Owl

[Wednesday, July 09, 2003] Astronomers have assembled the first effective model for both
the shape and evolutionary history of the Owl Nebula, the well-
known planetary nebula in the constellation Ursa Major.

[Wednesday, July 09, 2003] Operating a sophisticated environmental support system, with humans very distant from the hardware, is a challenge. Trying to get one to work in the most out of the way place you can find is one way to make sure you know what to do on Mars.

[Thursday, July 10, 2003] NASA's Inspector General has found that overly optimistic predictions of future flight rates, minimal regulation of astronaut candidate selection, and the need to staff engineering positions at JSC to be factors in NASA's astronaut hiring process.

[Thursday, July 10, 2003] Long before our Sun and Earth ever existed, a Jupiter-
sized planet formed around a sun-like star. Now, almost 13 billion years later, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has precisely measured the mass of this farthest and oldest known planet.

[Saturday, July 12, 2003] The CAIB has released this document dealing with the events which led up to the Columbia accident which may be included - in whole or in part - with its final, official report due for release in August 2003.

[Sunday, July 13, 2003] NASA's spacecraft designed to test two important predictions of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity has been shipped from Sunnyvale, CA to its launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base, after completing environmental testing.

[Monday, July 14, 2003] Lately, it seems like every time I look out the window I see Canada. A few weeks ago it seemed that it was always the southern Andes Mountains and Tierra Del Fuego. While I have nothing against Canada or the Andes Mountains, I got to wondering why.

[Wednesday, July 16, 2003] NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center will lead the effort to discover if comets supplied the raw material for the origin of life on Earth, and if they could do so for alien worlds, as part of its participation in NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) research.

[Wednesday, July 16, 2003] Canada's NRC Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory will be the site for the design and construction of the "electronic brains" for the Expanded Very Large Array, a major US national radio astronomy project underway near Socorro, New Mexico.

[Wednesday, July 16, 2003] Astronomers have discovered a complex cosmic mirage in the southern constellation Crater. This "gravitational lens" system consists of (at least) four images of the same quasar as well as a ring-shaped image of the galaxy in which the quasar reside.

[Wednesday, July 16, 2003] If the sky is clear tonight, look up high and try to find Lacerta (the constellation of the Lizard), between Cygnus and Cassiopeia. How many stars can we see, and could any of them be hiding habitable planets?

[Thursday, July 17, 2003] On the night of 3 July 2003, the Mars Express spacecraft was pointed backwards to obtain a view of the Earth-Moon system from a distance of 8 million km while on its way to Mars.

[Friday, July 18, 2003] SOHO is back to full operation after its predicted 9-day-long high-gain antenna blackout. Engineers and scientists are now confident that they understand the situation and can work around it in the future to minimise the data losses.

[Monday, July 21, 2003] Our task was to erect a memorial to Columbia astronaut Michael Anderson - an inukshuk, a stone sculpture in rough human form used by the Inuit to mark territory and serve as reference points for those who traverse this desolate place.

[Tuesday, July 22, 2003] A comparison of 754 nearby stars like our sun -- some with planets and some without -- shows definitively that the more iron and other metals there are in a star, the greater the chance it has a companion planet.

[Tuesday, July 22, 2003] Astronomers have found direct evidence for a "pancake" of gas and dust at the center of Circinus -- a thin, warped disk surrounding the galaxy's central, supermassive black hole.

[Friday, July 25, 2003] Astronomers studying the most distant quasar yet found in the
Universe have discovered a massive reservoir of gas containing
atoms made in the cores of some of the first stars ever formed.

»»Spacelift Washington - A Forge of Consensus: Political Leadership and the Future of Space Exploration

[Sunday, July 27, 2003] The Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy was unexpected, unforeseen, and unavoidable. But it has spawned a unique opportunity to lay out a positive new direction for the U.S. civil space program.

[Monday, July 28, 2003] NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has beamed back revealing images of
hundreds of galaxies to expectant astronomers, providing the first
batch of data on star formation that they had hoped for.

[Monday, July 28, 2003] The staying power of seafloor hydrothermal vent systems like the bizarre Lost
City vent field is one reason they also may have been incubators of Earth's
earliest life, scientists report in a paper published in the July 25 issue of
Science.

»»NASA Marks Space Milestone: 1,000 Days of Human Presence on International Space Station

[Monday, July 28, 2003] A milestone will be marked in space Tuesday, the 1,000th
consecutive day of people living and working aboard the
International Space Station. Seven crews have lived on the
Space Station, as it has dramatically grown in size and
capabilities.

[Tuesday, July 29, 2003] On Thursday, July 31, 2003, senior administration officials and representatives from more than 30 nations meet in Washington to establish plans for an integrated international Earth observation system.

[Tuesday, July 29, 2003] "Today I had two exercise sessions - because exercise here is even more important than it is on Earth - where you get a lot of exercise without even knowing it. Here, as far as your muscles and bones are concerned, life is just effortless."

[Wednesday, July 30, 2003] NASA has prepared a draft protocol for the testing and evaluation of samples that may be returned from Mars by future missions in its Mars exploration program. Public comments are being solicited.

[Thursday, July 31, 2003] The future is here for spacecraft propulsion and the trouble-free engine
performance that every vehicle operator would like to see, achieved by an
ion engine running for a record 30,352 hours.